


Heir Apparent

by rainproof



Series: Earth-1796 [6]
Category: The Avengers (2012), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bad Parenting, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Abuse, Drunk Driving, Earth 1796, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Self-Destruction, Self-Loathing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainproof/pseuds/rainproof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Howard dead and gone, Obadiah Stane fields all the hard questions.</p><p> </p><p>This can be read as a stand-alone piece or a prequel to the events of 1796 Broadway!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heir Apparent

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written pre-[1796 Broadway](http://archiveofourown.org/works/972937/chapters/1912625), but has served as headcanon backstory for Tony throughout. It was added to the "official" canon when we chose to make 1796 a series, rather than just a stand-alone.
> 
> This can be read as a stand-alone character study or as backstory for other Earth-1796 fic. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!!!

By the time the funeral rolls around last night’s rain has transmuted into fluffy snow flurries that whip across the parking lot in great ever-changing whorls of white. The funeral home is huge, the room filled with wintery lilies and black roses that his mother would have loved. There’s a tea and coffee bar in the hallway.

When Tony arrives he is expected to (and therefore does) greet countless numbers of people. Person after person leans in and shakes his hand and sympathizes and says tiny nice things about his father that just _piss Tony off_ , because how is it Howard Stark had time to be so goddamn kind to these strangers when he never had a soft word for Tony? It’s ridiculous. It’s all so ridiculous.

Obie must see this on his face because twenty minutes before the services start he pulls Tony outside and they light up cigars together, standing in silent solidarity as the freezing wind cuts through their thin suits. The snow is heaping in pile around the base of bare trees.

It’s the first funeral Tony has ever attended - he was only three when Isaac Stark died; back then his parents left him at home with his caretaker rather than risk his crying interrupting the somber, highly publicized affair. He doesn’t remember his grandfather at all, though he does remember his mother holding his hand and trying to explain what had happened.

There aren't many kids here today either - in fact, Tony is the second youngest person in the room. Nobody from MIT shows up, not even Rhodey, because he’s deployed somewhere god awful and far away; because apparently they don’t give you leave to come to a near-stranger’s funeral, even if that near-stranger happens to be the father of your best friend and the army’s primary weapons contractor.

Tony sits next to Obie in the front row and listens as the services begin.

When its his turn to speak Obie gives his shoulder a squeeze and Tony stands, feeling awkward and wholly unprepared for the task in front of him. He knows he looks like a kid playing dress up; Obie made him cut his hair short and clean, had them take in one of Howard’s suits (when had Tony met Howard in height? Christ.) and selected a set of his father’s favorite cufflinks, declaring them Tony’s “press-conference armor”. 

He wore an SI lapel pin and had no idea what he would say.

Maybe the pre-service whiskey had been a mistake.

Moving numbly to the podium with the silence ringing endlessly in his ears, Tony looked out across the sea of people. There were some he recognized - the entire board was here, he knew their faces from the odd times they’d swept into and out of the New York house... a few had even turned up at his college graduation for photos with the prodigal son. There was Obie’s family in the second row, his bottle blonde wife and little Zeke (who’d never liked Tony much) seated next to a dark-eyed Tiberius Stone. The press junket would begin after the services, but a fair number of photogs and reporters were standing solemn and pale in the back of the crowd, note pads clutched in hand. They were waiting, he knew, for him. Wondering just how Anthony E. Stark was handling the stress of his parents’ death, waiting to see if this so-called _wunderkind_ was any more than smoke and mirrors set up by an ambitious father and his stern-faced business partner.

He clears his throat, hears it echo back to him in a room that seemed suddenly intense. In the front row he sees Obie nod sympathetically, his fingers twitching in a little gesture Tony knows means _go on, you can do this_.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you for coming,” he says, getting that right at least. “Your presence here today speaks volume for the high regard in which you held my parents, and I...” 

His throat tightens, he pauses to take a ragged breath.

“I know, on such short notice... it was hard. To get here.” 

No, no, no, this sounds terrible, it sounds stupid, he’s hiding behind his obligatory thank-yous and scrambling to come up with something, _anything_ to say about the cooling bodies of his mother and father, laying ten feet behind him still and solid and - 

“I don’t have a eulogy prepared,” Tony hears himself say, voice cracking. “Obadiah Stane - you know Obadiah, my closest friend and soon-to-be business partner wanted me to ... well, he’s like my old man, always has ... had.... has a plan. He wanted me to write something out, but I just - I have no idea what to say. How do people do this for _one_ parent? Let alone two.”

He holds his hands up helplessly and looks at them as if they answers are written there. He probably looks a little lost - who cares? He feels lost. Lost and trapped and free all at the same time.

His hands don’t help - if life were ordered and functional (like a machine) Tony would give the most amazing speeches, find the words automatically and fit everything into place.

But it wasn’t. It was organic and messy and derailed your solid, dependable future by knocking off the people manning the helm. 

He’s just nineteen, damn it, just...

In the back the reporters are scribbling fiercely, and Tony knows they’re committing this whole exercise in misery to paper so that they can be pick it over later on, his father’s critics and fans alike turning their terrible scrutiny onto the heir apparent. 

He wonders how long he’s paused there, has it gotten awkward? Sometimes his brain takes off on his own, sometimes nobody else keeps up, but sometimes his thoughts are slow and mushed.

Tony feels sick and tries again. 

“What do you say about Maria Stark? About Howard? My parents were... they were so many things. Most of them good, some of them bad. They raised me with a firm hand and taught me to make the best of the worst situations,” (which was a lie, how could they all sit there and nod as if it wasn’t) “but I’m not sure even the great Howard Stark could have prepared me for this, standing here and trying to sum up their lives into some kind of pat and thoughtful speech, some... some summary of their incredible gifts and flaws and legacies.”

He feels his eyes stinging and remembers Obie’s stern-faced orders. _Don’t cry. Don’t show weakness. Be organized, be thoughtful, lie through your teeth if you have to but_ don’t _let me see you cry up there. You’re a grown man, for god’s sake, just save it._

“My dad changed the world. He did what every man wants to do, I think... he reshaped the course of human events and left his fingerprints on history. My mom did too, in a way, because she left her own mark on him. I could tell you about my memories of late nights in the lab with dad” _like that ever happened, like he ever let me in_ “or the way my mom would scold me and once used Dawn dish soap to get motor oil out of my hair” _when she noticed_ “or how much they loved riding in that stupid, big, beautiful 1938 Talbot-Lago coup” _the car Howard had been driving drunk in the rain to a goddamn Christmas party, the car that killed them both_ “but I know the only eulogy that would really suit my dad is the one he wrote himself through all the incredible things that he created, the fingerprints that he left on the world.”

Of course Howard’s fingerprints were blood red, but Tony left that part out.

“They told me a few of you would be speaking today, so I’m going to be selfish and let _you_ share your memories of them. I’m not... I’m not ready to do the whole talk-about-them-in-past-tense thing, or to share with the kind of eloquence I know a few of you could,” he says, feeling like a wind-up toy with a hitch in its coil, stuttering and imperfect. All that was left of Howard Stark, a poor reflection in a tailored suit and another man’s cufflinks. “I’m not my mom, but I’m gonna try my damnedest to live with her generosity and spirit in mind. I’ll never be my dad, but I’m going to try my best to build, create, and lead Stark Industries in the way he would have wanted.”

Another lie.

“So thank you for coming, being willing to celebrate what you remember of them; next time I stand in front of a crowd like this maybe I’ll listen to Obie and write my speech down.”

He thought a few faces in the audience were smiling in a way that was probably sympathetic and not relieved - when he stepped away from the podium and the horrible caskets Obie was there, wrapping an arm around him in a half-embrace. He tries to pull Tony back towards the first row of benches but Tony presses his head in close enough to whisper into the taller man’s ear.

“I gotta go, Obie, I can’t - I can’t stay here,” Tony hisses under his breath, knowing he must look like a maniac being held together with spit and coffee. He feels that way, strung out, exhausted.

Stane turns slightly so that nobody in the audience can read their lips, granting Tony as much privacy as he’ll get standing in front of two hundred odd people. He’s so damn collected under pressure, why can’t Tony ever be that collected? “It’s just another hour, you walk out now, what’ll it look like?”

Tony squeezes his friend’s arm with shaking fingers. “I have to, I can’t do this, I can’t - ”

“You’re a Stark. You can.” 

“Please,” Tony manages, and Obie studies his expression for a moment before he relinquishes his arm. 

“Make it good,” says Obie.

Tony scrubs at his face with a hand and, with practice grace, slides on the sunglasses from his pocket and over his eyes, turning his back on the caskets and the next speaker. He walks down the center aisle with his chin tipped up and his stride strong, aware in vague way of the many faces turned up at him in shock. At the end of the room he shoves a few of the cameras away when the photographers have the balls to stuff them in his face, then stalks out into the snow and promptly lights up a cigarette.

Nobody has the nerve to follow him out, not even the photographers, so he burns his cigarette down to the filter as he watches the flakes collect on his sleeves.

Then he goes to the car and throws himself into a plush leather backseat that smells like his dad.

 _Fuck them, fuck them all,_ he thinks, and orders the driver to take him home.

 

-

 

Obadiah Stane finds him in Howard’s study. Tony wasn’t sure why he’d ended up here, alone in a house that was entirely too dark and cold to be a home. Some sense of perverse obligation, probably.... the study was a room he’d never been allowed in as a boy. His first impulse had been to start knocking shit over, to tear the picture frames from the wall, hurl a few books through the windows and let the snow soak the plush rug his father refused to let his son step on in shoes... 

The second impulse had been to break every single fucking rule Howard had ever made.

With that goal in mind Tony currently sat in his father’s favorite leather chair, clutching a glass of his father’s favorite overpriced whiskey, his feet up on the expensive mahogany desk and a vintage (mint-in-box, until roughly half an hour ago) Captain America figurine pacing back and forth on his knees. He’d been playing a big band record on the expensive Edison phonograph, but the needle had polished off the last track and now all it provided was a background of steady, scratchy static.

“Aren’t you a little old for dolls?” Obadiah asked, standing in the doorway.

“Technically,” Tony says flatly, “it’s an _action figure._ ” He wishes the figurine had posable hands and not just shoulders, he would have made him give Obie the finger.

There’s silence for a moment, then Obie sighs and enters, looking around Howard’s study with more emotion in his expression that Tony has seen there all day. He gentle pulls the needle from the record and slides the black disk back into its paper sleeve, then goes to the window and looks out.

Tony watches him, wondering how many conversations Stane had with his father in this very room over this very whiskey. He half-suspects that if he and Zeke Stane ever got along well enough to have an actual conversation they would discover they had more in common than either knew - each with a father more concerned with the DOW than their family development. 

At last Stane pulls up his usual chair, but not before pouring _himself_ a whiskey and topping off Tony’s glass.

What a guy.

“What’s the damage?” Tony asks, not really wanting to know. Captain America (complete with detachable shield and cowl) moves from his right leg down to the surface of the desk, his plastic face pointed in Obie’s general direction. Tony deepens his voice and gives the little plastic man a wiggle, as though he’s talking. “Has the media eaten us alive, sir?”

Obie looks from the figurine to Tony and Tony knows he’s regretting refilling his glass. He’s not sure how much whiskey he’s actually had do drink and he doesn’t care.

“Actually,” he says, leaning in towards the desk, “you impressed the hell out of them. It was nicely done, Tones.”

“Shit. Really?” Tony lets his eyes meet Obie’s for the first time since the man entered and he realizes he’s not just saying that to make Tony feel better - there’s this _look_ Obie gets when he’s feeling smug. Tonight it’s muted, washed over with what Tony supposes must be Obadiah’s version of grief, but it’s there all the same. “It was awful.”

“No,” Obie says, tapping on the side of his glass. “It was honest, it was what they wanted.”

“I sounded like an idiot.”

“You sounded..." he rolls his wrist, looking for words. "like a kid.”

“Newsflash, old man - I’m not a kid. I’m not sure I ever _was_ a kid.”

Obie raises his brows and Tony realizes even as he speaks he’s playing with a _toy_. He drops Cap onto the desk with a scowl. “Regardless, vulnerability is touching, especially when coupled with grace. Most major media outlets played off your departure as sympathetic - 'a red-eyed Tony Stark left the services early after delivering a touching off-the-cuff eulogy,' etc etc. The board was as pleased as they could be on a day like today.”

“So what does that mean?” Tony asks, uncertainly. He hasn’t actually considering the ramifications of his parents’ death beyond his own little world, go figure. SI stocks would be plummeting, the board would be in a panic, the media... 

“It may buy you some time. We’ve issued a statement on your behalf asking for your privacy to be respected. They’ll all ignore it eventually, but it will take the sting off.” Obadiah shoots Tony a faint smile. “Your father would be proud.”

“No,” Tony corrects. “He wouldn’t. It was just a stupid speech. I should have written it down.”

“It’s not ‘just’ anything, it was the only eulogy you’ll ever give your parents,” Obadiah is watching him with a careful eye now, not drinking his whiskey. “Maybe it hurts to think about now, but in a few years...”

“It won’t ever stop hurting.”

Obie stares at him for a long moment, sips his drink, and evidently gives up the pep-talk entirely. “No. It won’t.”

Tony thinks about that, wonders if he should feel relief, or vindictive pleasure, or anything at all. He doesn’t. “Does the press know he was drinking?”

“We paid off the coroner just in case, no sense making this messier than it already is. Official sources cite black ice - really, Tony, even _we_ don’t know he was drinking. Eyewitnesses at the party don’t recall whether or not he was holding a glass.”

 _Yeah,_ thinks Tony, _because of the fat fucking checks you cut them._

“He was,” Tony says, tired. “He always was.”

Obadiah doesn’t respond to that, Tony knows he knows the truth. Ah, well.

There’s a photo of Howard and Maria on the desk; now that his hands are unoccupied with Captain America he reaches for the picture frame and runs his thumbs along the edges, staring at it. The picture was taken years ago - his father looks a little younger, less gray around the temples. His mother could have been a model, all smiling dark eyes and the knowing smirk she gave Tony.

“Obadiah,” he says, and senses the way the man recoils when his full name comes out of Tony’s mouth, “did my dad want kids?”

A moment of silence, then careful posturing. “Tony, I’m not sure...”

Tony stares at the picture, hard - not at Obie, at the panic he knows he’d see there under the careful veneer of professionalism. “No, seriously. I want to know. I’ve always wondered, really, since I was old enough to know that ‘accidents’ happen when you get stupid. He was so much older than mom, I’d always kind of figured she wanted a family and he just sort of rolled with it. Can you imagine what he would have done if I’d asked? Jesus.”

Obie can probably imagine better than Tony.

“We should have this conversation when you’re sober.”

“Not planning to be sober anytime soon, Obie.” Tony lets his eyes flick upwards, knowing Obie will see Maria in them and knowing it will weaken his resolve. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

The balding man purses his lips and shrugs halfheartedly. “You’re the genius, you tell me.”

“You know it doesn’t work that way,” Tony reminds him, taking a long sip. The ice in his glass is melting, mellows the flavor into something long and smooth and smokey. Howard always looked powerful sitting here in his desk; Tony thought he’d feel that way too when his turn came along... he doesn’t feel powerful, though, he doesn’t feel that different. “People are harder than machines.”

“Your father used to say that.”

Tony snorts. “Well, dysfunction seems to be a family trait, so...”

“He wasn’t always like that,” Obadiah sighs, sits back, looks genuinely weary. Tony tries to recall the last time he saw an expression that honest on Stane’s face, but he can’t. Obadiah plays things close to his chest, sometimes even Howard was surprised by what came out of his mouth... “You have to understand, Tony, he was a man who went through a lot. He wasn’t just _trying_ to improve the world, it was an all-consuming need, an obsession, really. I think he always knew he didn’t have time to raise a family the way a family should be raised.”

“He found time to marry my mom.”

“Maria blindsided him,” says Obadiah, earnestly. “Your mother was very... special. When she was young she had this presence... she could stop a room when she walked in, like an elemental force. She was just that beautiful, that poised.”

“Pretty face, I know, I know.”

“Howard wouldn’t have fallen for just that. He was a dedicated and enthusiastic bachelor by that point in his life, but it all flew out the window when she walked in. Don’t get me wrong - “ and here he smiles, having known Howard when he was young enough to be entertaining at a club, “he chased a fair number of skirts in his younger days, but there was never anyone like Maria. When he met her he had to have her, and when he finally got her he would have done anything to make her happy.”

“Including providing the obligatory heir to her family line, and to SI.”

“It wasn’t like that, Tony. You weren’t an obligation, you were a gift. You were everything she wanted and something only Howard could give her, so he chose to do so. As many problems as your father had, he wasn't a stupid man. He knew what he was getting into; he must have felt that having a child would be preferable to the alternative." 

Tony considered that, knuckles white around his tumbler. Maybe that was better than being an accident, but wanting the love of your life to have the child she wished for and wanting one of your own were two different things. “Great job, dad. Too bad children aren’t an inanimate thing, a necklace or a car or something sparkly you can bring into the house and then spend the next two decades ignoring.”

“‘People are harder than machines’,” Obadiah shrugs. “Howard didn’t know how to be a father, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t care about you in his own way.”

“‘Care about’. Not love, Obie?” Tony feels himself smiling unconsciously. He doesn’t mind the way Obie said it; actually, it feels perversely good to find his suspicions were founded in truth. Maybe he knew Howard better than he thought he did.

“Howard didn’t love many things, and he certainly didn’t love himself. If he distanced himself from you, his motives may have been more altruistic than you think.”

“ _Altruistic?_ ” Tony nearly choked. “Distance? Fuck, Obie, I loved his distance. It was when he came in close that I knew I was in serious shit.”

Now Obadiah has gone all rigid with discomfort, he can sense the thin ice and Tony isn’t about to give him a reprieve. How many years have they danced around this topic? Instead he lays the photo face-down on the desk and slides it away, reaching again for the Captain America figurine. He holds it up for Obie to see, turning the injection-molded body this way and that in the dim light filtering in through the window. 

They were both waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Tony to say it out loud, so he did. “Did you know he hit me?”

“Tony...”

“Seriously.” It felt like opening a dam, words flooded his mouth and he would never, never be able to swallow them again. “The first time I can remember I was probably, I don’t know, maybe four? I found a box of his _vintage_ Captain America gear, there was this little half-sized shield that would fit me just perfectly, I was so excited that I tore open the box and made a cape out of a bedsheet - like Captain America wears a fucking cape, right? Stupid.” Tony loses himself a moment, remembering the wash of indistinct, uncertain fear he’d felt when Howard appeared in the doorway of his bedroom. “When he found the opened packaging he tore after me and slapped the absolute shit out of me. Mom screamed about it, and cried, of course, and dad apologized and told me he loved me and made me promise to tell the doctor I’d fallen off the slide in the back yard.”

Obadiah was staring at him, looking green and clutching the tumbler in his hand as though it were a lifeline. “I remember your fall.”

“ _Fall_ ,” Tony says, darkly amused. “Slightly more believable than ‘he ran into a door’, given how clumsy I was.”

“ _Christ_ , Tones.”

“You didn’t know,” Tony observes, feeling oddly relieved.

“I...” his fingers tense on the glass and Tony’s heart falls into his stomach. He hadn’t realized he was capable of feeling another degree of disappointment, but apparently he hadn’t quite bottomed out. “I suspected, but ...”

“Suspected? Jesus, Obie. _Really_?”

“Things were complicated,” the man deflects. Ugh.

That _matters_. It was one thing to believe Howard - genius that he was - had covered his tracks... another thing altogether to know that people around them had clued in and yet done nothing. Obadiah Stane was supposed to be a man he could trust, a partner in the business world and a friend in the personal. How could he watch Tony grow up, _knowing_ and yet never...

“It doesn’t seem that complicated to me,” Tony frowns, pulls his feet off the desk, sits up straight and sets his whiskey aside. He takes Cap’s arms and brings them up - fully posable! - to gesture on his behalf. “I mean, a grown _man_ hitting a _child_ in the _face_. Pretty straightforward. Cap does not approve.”

“Howard could be volatile,” Tony snorts at the word choice and Obadiah glares at him. “but he was brilliant, too, and before he made me a partner he was signing my paychecks. SI needed him. I never saw it happen, and believe it or not, its not a friend’s place to interfere with the parenting of a colleague. It was between Howard and Maria to work out, and they did.”

“Yeah, by shipping me off to boarding school.”

“Your mother loved you desperately, Tony, can you imagine how hard that was for her?” Again that look of earnest grief, poor Obie, losing his bestie and his bestie’s beautiful wife all in one night. He would miss Howard far more than Tony, that was for sure. “It crushed her, but she knew it was necessary. She knew you’d be safer, well taken care of. Would you have been happier here?”

Tony thought that _was_ actually pretty sad - the only person who’d ever genuinely loved him, the reason Howard had bothered to have a child at all, was so terrified for his well being she essentially gave him up at six. “I didn’t need a boarding school, I needed a father who wasn’t a raging, child-beating alcoholic.”

Obie’s next words rolled through Tony like a punch to the gut. “Tony, have you ever considered that you _weren’t the son your father needed_?”

“Wh...” Tony narrowed his eyes, feeling his face flush. The other man’s eyes are dark and stern, his mouth pressed in a thin line - like he’s tired of listening to Tony bitch about Howard, as though Howard deserved a friend defending him to the kid he’d scarred for life. “What the fuck, Obie, you can’t just-“

“I _can_ ,” says the man, and fuck him, really? “You wanted honesty - here’s a little honesty that may not have figured into your understanding of Howard Stark.” Obie sets his glass down with more force than necessary and leans forward intently. 

Tony suddenly isn’t so sure he really wants to know.

“Howard wasn’t _like_ you, Tony. Howard was brilliant, skilled, talented - but he worked his ass off for what he had. Your grandfather capitalized on America’s industrial revolution, assembly lines and auto plants, but Howard wanted to do something new. You’ve seen the old reels, you know how many of his attempts at revolutionizing the modern world ended up as laughingstocks. Flying cars? Jet packs? Psh. The only thing he had a natural skill for before the war was piloting aircraft - the man _loved_ to fly.”

Tony’s mouth went dry. More whiskey didn’t help.

“So imagine you spend your life looking for ways to improve the human condition, and then war breaks out and it’s _horrifying._ People are shoving each other into ovens and being gassed to death by the hundred thousand. The Allies hear word of millions of shoes being collected off corpses, piled, and resold to German citizens. It’s monstrous, and it _has to stop_ , so your dad throws his lot in with the glorious cause and helps produce America’s first super-hero. He then gets a front row seat as the man I personally heard him describe as “a paragon of humanity” and “everything that’s right with the world” drowns in the arctic ocean.”

The Captain America figurine slips out of Tony’s sweaty fingers.

“If someone _that good_ can be shut off like a light switch, the world clearly needs something other than a paragon. It needs people able to make hard choices. Howard Stark may not have been a mechanical savant, but he had enough vision to realize there was a role your country needed him to fill. He joins up with the Manhattan Project, finds he has a true skill in weapons manufacturing, and the rest is history.”

“That has nothing to do with me,” Tony croaks. “It’s not my fault he was born into a world full of Nazis and super serum.”

“It has _everything_ to do with you! How do you think your father felt when you came along and started turning your remote controlled cars into robots before you could read? You were fixing motors when most kids are learning the difference between red and blue. You touch machines and you just _get_ them. It’s all black magic to me, but Howard knew enough to understand just how incredible your gifts are, knew intimately how brilliant you were, saw that you had _every gift he’d ever wanted and never had_ , and you were unlimited by time and circumstance. You made toys and automatic potato peelers and programmed a computer to sing your favorite nursery rhymes on command while your dad perfected self-guided missile systems and the flame-throwers that burned down Vietnam.”

Tony’s vision is swimming. He thinks he might be crying, so he sets his forehead against the mahogany to keep Obie from seeing tears track down his cheeks.

“You think Howard Stark wanted to be in the weapons business in the first place? _Please_ , you’re not that stupid. He wanted flying cars and jet packs. He wanted the freedom to create whatever idiotic little toys struck his fancy, but there was SI to think of, your family, the livelihood of everyone on staff sitting around waiting to sell his next big bomb... and there were the soldiers themselves. He knew each missile would keep men like his old friend Steve Rogers off the ground and out of the line of fire, he knew he couldn’t stop. He was a good man, and he did what he had to do - but don’t think for a moment there wasn’t a little resentment in the mix. He admired you, he bragged incessantly about you, he wanted you to be successful - but he couldn’t stand sitting there and watching the way you turned his lifetime of achievements into literal child’s play.” 

“He bragged about me?” Tony asks, his voice muffled. He knew that wasn’t the part of that lengthy confession he should be clinging to, but it was the part the stuck in his brain and begged for elaboration.

“Of course he did. You’ve read the interviews.”

“Not for the interviews,” he wipes his eyes and sits up again, steeling himself. “To you.”

“Yes,” says Obie, and if that’s a lie it’s a damn good one.

If it’s a lie, Tony doesn’t want to know. “He told you all of that?”

“In bits and pieces.” Obie leans back and Tony feels a surge of relief knowing that the all-too-intimate admission is over. “You know how he was when he drank. I can’t tell you the number of times we were in LA or Tokyo or London and I found myself hauling his drunk ass back to a hotel room while he waxed philosophical over the death of Captain America.”

That doesn’t surprise Tony, he’d found his dad sprawled across his desk on half a dozen separate occasions... strange to imagine someone taking care of Howard in the way Rhodey used to take care of Tony back at MIT - Obie might be imperfect as far as friends and confidants went, but he must have been good to Howard. Tony licked his cracked lips. “Did he ever hit my mom?”

“I don’t think so,” Obie admits, and that answer seems honest, too. Good.

Tony feels a horrible smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “Did he hit you?”

“Once,” says Obie, his eyes flat and unreadable.

Tony would have liked to see that go down, he can guess why Howard only got one shot in. Obadiah Stane is not a small man; he’s built like an especially fit linebacker and towered over both Tony and his father.

Instead of asking for details, he hones in on his final topic... it would be a shame to waste the honest, thoughtful mood Obadiah has slipped into.

“Did dad want me to take over Stark Industries?”

“Yes,” says Stane immediately, and Tony licks his lips again. He’s nervous, now. 

“Even though I’m only nineteen?”

Stane shrugs. “It’s a multi-billion dollar company that literally has your name stamped all over it. There needs to be a Stark heading the whole mess; we’re not ready to go public... that would require providing a kind of transparency that just wouldn’t work. So yes - I think Howard would have wanted to you to step up to the plate in a pinch.”

Tony’s voice is smaller, now. “What if I don’t want to?”

Obadiah fucking Stane pins him to the chair with his eyes and says, simply: “You want to.”

“I don’t,” Tony bursts out immediately, a lance of hot guilt speeding through his body. “I really don’t. I don’t want to make weapons. I want to soup up fucking Ferraris for fun - I want to be a stupid kid and drive to California and smoke weed on the beach and date models and live _just a little fucking bit_ before this whole multi-billion dollar conglomerate comes crashing down on my head and drives me to a life of soulless alcoholic misery."

For the first time tonight Obie actually looks angry. He's staring at Tony like the sight disgusts him, like he can't believe what he's hearing. "Running this company is a privilege, Tony - your grandfather did it, your father did it, someday your children will do it. SI is what allows you to breeze through life the way you always have, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, kid. You think you can maintain your quality of life if you kick SI to the curb?"

Tony feels cold and hot all at once. "I don't think I'll ever need to worry about cash, Obie. I'm good enough to make bank with just my brains, I bet dozens of companies would scramble to have a Stark on staff..."

"You say that now, because you're nineteen and obtuse," the broad, bald man growls at him. "You may be brilliant, but brilliance requires direction, and inventing is a hell of a lot more entertaining when you have an entire legal team protecting your interests, patenting your projects, marketing your machines. You want to work somewhere else and be pushed around like a fucking peon in some _other_ guy's lab, doing what you're told, when you're told? Be my fucking guest."

Across from him Tony winces and looks down. "It just feels like everything's gone. Everything I had, and everything I wanted for myself." 

"It's not. You're being absurd." 

It was selfish, he knew. _Horribly_ selfish, considering Maria Stark had lost her life and all Tony had lost was his shot at a few years of idle exploration and stupid decisions; he still felt angry. Angry at his father’s failure to curb his alcoholism, angry with his mom for getting into the car in the first place when she _fucking knew better_ , when she could read Howard like a book and had to have _known_ he’d been drinking. He was angry that he himself was, at present, downing the same fucking whiskey his dad must have been slamming back on his last night alive, and that he couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t want to stop.

“I can’t do it,” he says, and knows it’s true. He braces one elbow on the desk and drops his forehead into it, fingers rubbing at his temples. There’s a migraine in his near future and he doesn’t even care - it’ll be nice to have an excuse to lay around in his bed in the dark. “you’ll see. It’s all gonna go to hell.”

He sits that way for a long while until Obie’s chair scrapes forward and he suddenly feels a hand stroking his hair. 

“It doesn’t have to be hard, Tony. You’re not Howard. Nobody wants you to be Howard, nobody expects you to be Howard.”

“We’ve heard enough lies today Stane,” Tony says, but he doesn’t move. He can’t remember Obie ever touching him like this, but the gentle kindness of it is almost too much for him to stand.

“Well, _I_ neither want nor expect it from you. And that’s not a lie.”

Tony is silent.

“How about this," he says, and his voice has gone soft and considerate. "How about I speak to the Board of Directors, suggest a transition period? We could buy you some time. You _are_ an adult, but you’re also a recent graduate, and grieving. We’ve got an R &D facility outside Los Angeles. You could start there in engineering or design, we'll tell the press you want to get to know the company from the ground up - it’d be a hell of a PR move, and you’d have some time to pull yourself together.”

Tony tips his head up, stunned. “I... really?”

“We’ll tell them Howard asked me to do it when you were younger, in case something happened. I’ll take up the position of CEO, bill it as an interregnum kind of thing, and when you’re ready we can pull you out of R&D and into the business side in a more formal capacity. Maybe when you hit 21, 25, sometime in there.”

It feels like a thousand pounds of pressure have lifted off his chest. It feels like the first gulp of air after lingering underwater ten seconds too long. He thinks he might faint. “That’s a lot to ask of you, Obie,” Tony whispers, knowing that Obie is his Atlas, has just offered to take the world onto his shoulders.

“You’re Howard’s son,” says the other man, eyes dark and confidently certain. “Even if you weren’t, you deserve a chance to exist outside of your academic career - you’ll be a better fit for the job if you’ve had a chance to figure yourself out outside of your role at SI.” His eyes crinkle up in a smile. “My twenties were some of the most entertaining years of my life.”

“God, Obie,” Tony feels himself smiling back, his first real smile in days. “That's - that would be - ... I could kiss you right now.”

“How about we settle for a simple _thank you?_ ” Obie ruffles his hair the way he did when Tony was a child and studies him, glass in hand. “Just... be _careful_ , Tony. You and your father are very alike. I don’t want to see you make the mistakes he did.”

“Don’t worry,” Tony says with a dark-eyed smirk, his heart weirdly buoyant and caught up in his throat. “I’m _never_ having children.”

Obie’s mouth opens, shuts, opens again, and he gives Tony a look that is absolutely unreadable. “I meant with the drinking.”

“Oh,” says Tony, and shrugs. “Yeah. I’ll be careful, Obie.”

“Promise me.”

They toast, glass on glass, as the snow collects on the window frame and the wind whirls past the chimney. “I promise,” Tony says, and he’s surprised to find that he means it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Regret](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1532027) by [DifferentChild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DifferentChild/pseuds/DifferentChild)




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